A simplified coding and interleaving method for multi-band UWB systems: a performance comparison

Ultra wideband (UWB) has been identified as a possible key technology in the realization of the future "wireless world". Of particular interest is multi-band UWB system, which divides the available spectrum into multiple bands, allowing for the efficient use of the existing spectrum. The multi-band UWB system has the flexibility to eliminate interference and coexistence problems with other wireless standard for WPAN and WLAN by simply removing the affected bands. Efficient coding strategy is one of design challenge for very high data rate UWB systems. In this paper, a simplified coding scheme has been proposed using Reed-Solomon code as outer-code and quadrature M-ary orthogonal keying (QMOK) as inner-code. Performance studies of a multi-band UWB system with the proposed simplified coding scheme have been conducted. The results show that the proposed simplified coding scheme achieves significant performance improvement without trading off with complexity. The coding performance is evaluated using both single-stream and multi-stream encode/decode chain for multi-band UWB systems. This paper also investigates the use of different interleaving structure to achieve frequency diversity for the proposed system.